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Welcome to The Legacy Investor Podcast, where we talk money, investing, business, and what it means to leave a legacy for generations to come. Hosted by Cameron Philgreen, this show dives deep into the intersection of entrepreneurship, investing, and legacy-building, all while keeping God at the center. Whether you're a seasoned investor or just starting out, you'll discover how to align your financial journey with your faith, grow wealth with integrity, and create a lasting impact for generations to come. Join in, as we explore practical strategies, real-world stories, and timeless biblical principles to help you honor God in every step of your journey.
Okay, Bryan Wetzel, welcome to the Legacy Investor. How are we doing today, sir? I'm doing well. Thanks for having me. Awesome. Looking forward to it. I'm excited to chat with you. We have a lot in common between restaurants, small business, and I'm not a gym owner, but I hit the gym sometimes. A lot that we can talk about here, plus faith. I'm curious about your thoughts on education and even vouchers that are coming out. Let's start with small business. I have a four-year-old, a three-year-old, and a nine-month-old. I want them to be a part of my business, whether it's real estate or the coffee shop or whatever. or whatever. It sounds like you have some experience in this area. Why don't you tell me about having your family in your small business and just give us the history of your businesses? Well, your family in your small business is something everybody desires. But just be aware that I've fired my daughter three times now. from the gym um and my stepdaughter didn't get fired but she she didn't like being under the watchful eye of the parents during her working time so she decided to go and work at somewhere else and so you know we give them the freedom to do whatever they want to do it would be lovely if they worked you know, in our, your business. But I understand if I think back to when I was their age, I probably wouldn't have wanted to work with my parents either. You know, it's, it's tough enough managing employees. And, you know, my restaurant was, was pretty big. So we had anywhere from 36 to 42 employees at any given time. And, you know, it gets, the amount of personalities, the, you know, you find out quickly that not everyone has the same work ethic. You find out quickly who you can trust and who you think will probably phone it in when it gets tough. And so you, I learned a lot of things along the way that helped me, but I would say owning a restaurant may be the hardest business to own. Now you have a coffee shop. I think that probably coffee, is a little easier. At least nobody sends back their coffee and says, I ordered medium well. This is not medium well. It's a little bit more straightforward. We had a really deep menu with a lot of different foods. The other problem too with my restaurant experience is that we opened up three months before we went into lockdown. And so we had just really gotten off the ground. We had gotten through that initial rush and we were stabilizing and then we didn't really have a good to go, you know, built up because business built up because we hadn't been around that long. So we had to try and establish it quickly. And I even started selling groceries to anything to get some income into the restaurant. And then after we opened, again or allowed, we couldn't be 50 percent full. And you're like, who's making these rules? You can't pay for a place for 50 percent of the of the building being used. And then after that, there were prices were going up and then there were a number of you remember there were supply chain issues where we weren't getting things. You know, I had to take wings off the menu at one point because when we put them on the menu, we were paying a dollar seventy eight a pound. And they went up to 375 a pound. Dang. And you're like, well, okay, we're going to lose money on the wing. So I either had to take them off or... You know, make 12 wings cost you 30 bucks. And since no one wants to pay that, we just we had to start. We were literally figuring things out as we went along. I always tell people I've been in business for myself for a long time, but no one ever teaches you how to deal with a pandemic that never came up. Yeah, I imagine that built a lot of resilience in you. You want to tell me about a time when you had to come up, came up against some sort of issue or conflict. I mean, a pandemic is a big one and how you got through that. And then I want to hear about also the exit. Sounds like you sold the restaurant this past year. I kind of want to hear all the nitty gritty numbers behind that sale as well, if you're up for it. But go for sure. So, well, I mean, having, I would say the biggest issue right after we came out of lockdown were supply chain issues. So we had a major distributor for our food, but sometimes things would be missing. If you remember during COVID, people forget a lot of this stuff. There were toilet paper shortages and chicken was short. It was hard to get chicken. And so you're each, you know, we had a sandwich board at the opening of the, at the front of the restaurant in the lobby. so to speak. And when people would come in, we, for at least a few months, we'd have to write on there. We have no chicken. We have none of this. We, this is not available today. This is not available today. And most people, because we were in coming out of the pandemic or in it, you know, they understood, but that also, you know, you're coming in because you, you like certain food and we don't have it. They just stopped coming. And so we had to come up with marketing things that we could try to get people in. And a lot of people weren't going out. I think people forget now how scared people were. I remember watching, I tell the story all the time. I was watching the Today Show or Good Morning America one morning. It was 2020, it was probably the summer. And they put up a chart on screen and it was a list of businesses that you want to avoid. during the pandemic in order of most serious to least serious number one was a restaurant and number two was a gym and i was like this is the first time i've been one into i've been one and two and i don't get to celebrate so um you know it just it was a constant like every week we were just trying to figure things out as we went along and you know, we, we eventually got off the ground and we really were doing pretty well. And, but we had a series of incidents. I have my kitchen manager who helped me open the place. It was very integral, well-loved. He was a great guy. He was, we, on New Year's Eve, 2021 going into 2022, We had the New Year's Eve. We were full. The restaurant was packed. We had a great party, great celebration. He didn't drink because he was going to go to a friend's house after it closed. And to hang out with them and celebrate with his friends. But on the way there, he was killed by a drunk driver hit head on. And, uh, that's how 2022 starts for us. Um, we ended up closing for the weekend and, um, you know, it just really took the wind out of us. So in October of 2022, I had several people asking to, to buy the restaurant and, I sold it, but you know, one of the things I did not count on, and this is a warning to anyone, and I hate this by the way, I think that this should not be allowed, but it is what it is. A lot of your vendors, the people who supply you with CO2 for your taps, your cleaning people, all of them, they put in that it's a two-year contract. Now, you probably sign it anyway because you think, well, if the business is closed, not here, what does it matter? Well, I was getting sued by all of these companies. At one point, I think I had 11 lawsuits coming at me, like the sheriff was here every week. Neighbors probably thought they were living next to a criminal, but they were civil suits. And it just took me a good six months to sort them out. And some of them I was able to either negotiate or settle. then I'd pay an attorney who, you know, would look through the contract on some and say, they don't have a case here, but they're still going to try. And it was, um, it wasn't what I expected because when I got, when I let go of the restaurant, I thought, okay, I'm reducing my stress. I'm reducing my, you know, the amount of gyms every day, make it, you know, It was not simpler. It was actually more crazy. Wow, man. And the thing is, I would tell them, I would say to one of the vendors, I would say, yes, but the new person who bought the restaurant is going to take, they're going to use your services. And they would say, yeah, but it's a new restaurant. And I say, but it's a location. Like, what are we arguing here? It's the same location. You're still getting business, but they would take the opportunity to try and squeeze some extra money out of you. Yeah. Okay. What did you learn about resilience through all this stuff? Well, I learned that what, that I'll be honest with you. I learned there were times from 2020 through the end of all of what I just told you about where I was having really bad chest pains, stressed out, hypertensive. I learned one night I just told, I literally, Like, I will pray silently to myself or whatever, but this night I got on my knees and I said, you know, God, I'm way in over my head. I don't know how to get all of this under control. And everything seems to be spiraling off the tracks. And I'm just... Just before... I'm giving this all to you. I'm not going to worry about it anymore. I'm going to assume that it's going to work out and I'm going to stop because it's honestly killing me. And I did that. And believe it or not, not only did this a lot of the stress, it was hard, but there were days when I couldn't. But a lot of the stress fell away, and honestly, most of it all began to sort of work out. It took a few months, but the worrying wasn't going to help me. And keeping my head about me and just trying to relax and realize that things would work themselves out was really the best advice i could have given myself that's awesome man man it reminds me of uh matthew 6 when jesus says you know don't worry don't worry about your clothes what you wear don't worry about tomorrow today has enough trouble of its own it sounds like you just really surrendered your business and your stress and your worry i did to him and he he delivered and he delivered you from that stress that's amazing man Yeah, a lot of times when you talk to somebody who's a minister, and a lot of times we say, I do that, but we're not really doing that. You think you might be a little bit, but I had to truly just give it all to God because there wasn't anything I could do about a lot of it, and I just... Believe it or not, it all began to work out. There were times when I think my wife thought we were in deep, deep, deep trouble. We started out in a good place. You don't open a restaurant because you're doing poorly in life. We're doing well. It seemed like we were about to be selling the house and trying to minimize and pay off all this debt, but a lot of it began to work out. I just had to give it to God and give it time. That's good, man. Can I ask, like, are you willing to share the numbers of like startup costs, the debt, you know, property and like all all the startup numbers and then the exit numbers? What it like, what did you end up exiting for? What was included in that? Like, are you willing to share that stuff? Love to hear. I think it applies to a lot of small businesses, and I have a very similar business as well. I'm just curious, like legitimately. Well, it was a big restaurant. We were a fairly large size, and the previous place was painted it orange and yellow for whatever reason. inside and it didn't look great i'm really it was beautiful what we did inside um we didn't do a franchise which means we had to develop all the the menu and the food the logos the marketing everything was from scratch probably cost about 300 000 to open um with only about 20 000 in reserve which i was hoping to go into with more but there was a lot of unexpected things and I would tell anybody who's opening a business, especially a restaurant, but any business, just be aware that things like with ours, the health department came in and said that due to the Americans with Disabilities Act, there were some things in our bathroom that had to be changed. And so those ended up, that was an additional 10 grand right there because you had the men and women's rooms that had to be Completely redone. The counters moved down. And so I wasn't expecting that one. But it was probably about $300,000. We were doing in business about $35,000 a week. We really needed to be doing about $33,000, $31,000 to break even. so that wasn't a lot of profit. Um, we had some times particularly in, you know, during when football was around and people would sit at the bar and drink where we were topping out at 40, 44,000 a week. Those are, we're in a small community. That's pretty decent numbers. If you're a manager of Longhorn though, you're like 44,000. That's what we do on Friday. Um, it just, you have to keep things in perspective, but the exit numbers were, uh, Well, I, it was about 175. I could have probably held out for more, but I was so ready to move on. And by the way, one of the things I didn't tell about the reason of moving on to wasn't just that I was the reason that I needed to was really is that my wife said, look, it's the restaurant or me. And the reason she gave me that ultimatum was this when I when I bought the restaurant or and opened it, I had a lady who had worked for Longhorn for several other big corporate restaurants. She was an opener for them. So she knew what she was doing. She was key. I couldn't have opened a restaurant without her. But she was much older than me. And she said, look, I don't want to do this. I'll do this for six months and help you get open. But I don't want to be, you know, if you work at a restaurant and particularly a bar, a grill, you're going to be there until midnight most nights. Even in the weekdays, if, you know, an hour and a half closing, if you close at 10, you're still getting out pretty late. And she said, I don't want to do that for the rest of my life. Just I'll help you get open. So she gave me six months and I hired another general manager, but after six or seven months, I found out she was skimming money. So she was fired. I hired another gentleman. And he was apparently decided that as the manager and GM, he should only work in the mornings. You cannot work in the mornings only if you're running a restaurant, all of your activity is in the evening at dinner. And so he he was getting paid better than the previous one. So he had to get so I was just having trouble finding people to run the restaurant. And so I was having to run the restaurant, there will be days when I remember Where hiring was an issue. I remember one, several Saturdays or Sundays where I would open, there'd be no one to work the bar at night, so I'd have to work the bar. So I was working to open and close on several instances. And my wife and I just didn't see each other. And so I understood where she was coming from. So I could have probably gotten more money. I know I could have, because after I sold it, unfortunately, a couple of people came forward and said, Oh, I would have given you like, well, you should have stepped forward sooner. Okay. So, so not a, not a perfect run. And I appreciate you being transparent, you know, and vulnerable. So tell me like, you know, for, for small business owners out there listening for, for people like you, myself, you know, what, what would you have done differently? What are the, some of the most common mistakes that, especially in restaurants and coffee shops and these service oriented businesses, like what are some of the most common mistakes and what would you have done differently? If you ask me that about other businesses that I've had that were successful that are maybe closed now, I have quite a bit to say when it comes to the restaurant, I don't really know what I would have done differently. We just, You know, three months after opening, we go into lockdown. We're in that for two months. We come out of that. We can only be 50% full. We come out of that where we can be full, fully, you know, fill all the seats. And now we're having trouble getting food and the prices are going up. So people don't want to go out to eat because it's costing more and more. And people weren't going out as much as they were before. That's even a problem now from what I understand from some of my friends who work at restaurants or own restaurants. But I think that the only thing I would have done differently is that I think we really needed more money in reserve. We, you know, we got P one of the problems too, is we got PPP money, a little bit of it. I love it when politicians make these rules for never run a small business, but they base it on labor and. And it was sort of the way the rules were set up. So since we had only been open for, you remember, they were like, you have to compare your labor for 2019, 2018, 2019, and 2020. And like, well, we weren't open. So how do we compare? So the amount of money we got was very, very small. It was even worse for the gyms because I keep a very small staff. You know, we don't have 36 people working at a gym. You wouldn't be able to make any money. So we got so little PPP money, it didn't even cover one month's rent. And we just, you know, even though I will say this, the landlord we had from the restaurant were very gracious at working with us. Immediately, they knew all of their people were going to this was going to be an issue because you couldn't be open. And so they said, look, we're going to let you take the next three months and move them to the end of the lease. And you don't owe any rent for the next three months. But. that was only a temporary help to be honest, because once you opened up and you're only 50% full, you can't pay the labor and pay the rent. So now you're behind unless you're taking it out of your personal account. And which is a rule of mine. You, you set aside your business money, you set aside your personal money, um, And it's dangerous to mix the two, by the way. We can go into that later from a legal standpoint. But I don't really know what we would have done. We were literally just responding each month to whatever crap was coming down on us. And I think that probably the one thing I might have done was I might have wanted more reserve money so that I could go and pluck a GM from a restaurant that was successful, maybe even a franchise restaurant. like a Longhorn or somewhere, somebody that I knew who could really run the restaurant and I didn't have to worry about them stealing or not knowing what they were doing. And we just didn't have the money in reserve to bump up the GM salary by 10 or $12,000. That just wasn't going to be possible. That's probably the biggest thing. If not for the labor issues, I think we would might even still be open to be honest with you. Yeah. Yeah. That's good, man. Thank you. Thank you. I had a restaurant in the past and we did great actually, but it was smaller. We did, it was more lunchy kind of stuff and, you know, simple foods. I was trying to do American fare. We had prime rib and ribeye and You know, we had burgers and wings and stuff, but we had a lot of, you know, really good food that is labor intensive to make. This is why there's so many Mexican restaurants nowadays because ground beef, rice, beans, very cheap very cheap and let's face it a mexican i don't want to out any mexican restaurant but the difference in a burrito an enchilada and a taco is this much you know it's just a different way we put it in a soft long shell this one's in a hard shell this one's yeah you know this one has a has a juice on it that's it On the financial side, you know, for this business and for future businesses and advice for small business owners, are you using your own cash? How much debt do you take on? You know, are you borrowing money? Are you using your own money? Use investors, use banks. What's your method of funding things? The restaurant had one investor silent. The rest of the money I use. So if you have the money in the bank, You need to work with your broker, but you can borrow on the money you have. They'll let you set it aside and you can borrow for little or no interest for a period. I took the money that my wife and I agreed to set aside and put that into the new restaurant account. I took the investment from the silent investor and we worked off of that. Now, I haven't really had a great experience with taking investment from other people. And this was an unusual case because he owned the lease on the space. He had essentially funded the previous restaurant that failed and he couldn't get out of the lease. So he needed this restaurant to do well. So he would pay the lease and it wasn't on his dime. But he put in $75,000 of it. This is the thing, when you take money from people, and there's various conversations here, if you take money from family and friends, that's a risky. Money, especially the kind of money you invest in a business, that will ruin your relationships if things go south. And so I always caution and I've made this mistake many times. So take it from somebody who has had this, has run into this issue. When you get into business with family and friends, you think you're doing the right thing because you know these people and they care about you and you care about them. But money has a way of separating those things. And especially when things, so I'll give you a good example. I had originally bought the gym. And I should go into how I got the gym because that was a master class in negotiating. Yeah, yeah. When I bought the gym, I bought it with one other gentleman who I knew loosely. I considered him a friend, but I didn't know him. And after two years, I took him to lunch one day and I said, you're going to buy me out or I'm going to buy you out. And this is not an option. And he said, why? And I said, because I'm going to kill you. I'm honestly going to choke you because he was making expenses, but we were 50-50 partners and he wasn't putting in 50% of the money. And the way, if you're listening to this and you're not aware, If we're 60, 40 partners, for instance, I'm 60 and you're 40. That means I'm responsible for 60% of the investment and you're responsible for 40. The moment that you put in more money than me, now we have an imbalance. You're either going to have, so what I had to do, because I had at that point put in about 40,000 more than him. is that either you have to renegotiate your contract, which they're not gonna wanna do, to adjust the percentage of ownership based on the investment. Or you're going to have to take the money you put in above your percentage of ownership and write that off as a loan to yourself. Does that make sense? So we're 50-50 partners. If we have to put in $100,000 for the business, 50,000 of it is from me. The other 50 has to come from you. And if I put in 70 and you put in 30, now we have an issue. um and i had i was uh i was talking to a lawyer one day who said he had a client whose brother they both inherited the business from the father of the business making millions of dollars a year tens of millions the brother was 50 50 partner but he didn't do anything he didn't work at all the other part the brother was working 60 hours a week and he kept coming to the lawyer saying how do we get him out of the business and the lawyer said well either you got to buy him out but why would he take the buyout because he's getting he's getting free money so i well the reason i bring that story up is that when you get into business with a family or friend and you sign that deal You can't just because they're not doing as much work as you are putting in as much money, you can't get them out of the business. That's not how it works by law. At that point, you have a contract. Now, there are contracts you can have a lawyer write up that tries to mitigate, you know, if one partner is not doing enough. But most cases, that's very subjective. And so you're going to be stuck with that partner for life unless they choose to leave or let you buy them out. So what I've done with real estate deals and with business is if I have a partnership, we actually will pay ourselves hourly for any work that we do on the business. And it's like pretty good between 20 and 100 bucks an hour. So, you know, if you're putting in more work than him, well, you're at least getting paid for that work and vice versa. If he's not putting in any work, like he's not getting that extra hourly wage on top. I mean, just for the listeners, if you are setting up a partnership, I mean, this has worked really well for all my real estate partnerships. Like we just, it's like 50 bucks an hour. And, uh, if I have to, you know, I, I tend to be more handy than my partners. And so if I, and I, if I hustle over there and fix a stove or fix a light switch or whatever, like I just got paid 50 bucks, which is not even a lot by my standards. You just come up with that agreement ahead of time. Like if it's a hundred bucks or 200 bucks an hour, like make it worth your time to, to hustle. And, um, And vice versa, if you don't if you're not doing the work, then, you know, so I I don't know, that might be helpful for somebody, but I kind of want to. Did you have anything? You put a cap on how much? that can be, so like if your partner suddenly says I want 300 an hour. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's all, it's written ahead of time. So like I have one agreement from five years ago, that's $20 an hour. So, you know, it's like, I don't know. I mean, I'm going to send someone over there to fix the stove instead of like me going, you know, and that, that could become an issue. I guess you could have a stipulation in the, in the, um, we call them a memorandum of agreement or a memorandum of understanding. You could have something in there where if you, if you both agree that the hourly, you know, that the hourly wage for the partners should increase, you can do that. But anyway, I hope that's helpful for somebody out there. Yeah, that is, that's, those are, I've heard of that and that is a good idea. Yeah. So let's talk about, you know, you brought up mixing personal and business funds and why that's, why that's an issue. What have you learned in that area? Well, I actually learned this because I was able to use it when I was suing someone else many, many, many years ago. I used to be more in TV. That's where I started out in television production as a producer and editor. The moment you, so let's say you have a small business and someone comes to you, a vendor, and says, you know, we have an invoice here that's going to be late. And you look at the business account, there's not enough to pay it, but you know you have it in your personal. The right way to do this is to put the money in your business account and write it up as the owner's investment in the business. And then write the check to the vendor from the business. So many people do this mistake just because they're lazy and it's easy. They'll say, you know what, don't worry about it. And they'll write a personal check for that. Well, now what you've done is you've given a lawyer, if you ever get sued, the ability to pass. So the reason you become a corporation is to protect your personal money and your personal things. But once you have signed a check personally, a lawyer can say, see, they are acting outside of the corporation. So therefore, they can pay my client as well out of their personal account. They call this piercing the corporate veil. I had a producer I had a lady who was a producer, produced a show in Atlanta. And a long story short, we had edited a bunch of shows, but she hadn't paid in a while. She owed quite a bit of money. And what she did was she tried to bankrupt her production company to keep me from... I had won the lawsuit. She tried to, but I had a friend of mine was an attorney and he said, has she ever paid you personally? I said, yeah, about half of the time. He said, oh, there you go. Go back to your lawyer and tell them that. Do you have copy? I had copies of the checks because back then the bank would send you your statement each month and they would have photocopies of anything you deposited. And we went back to court and the court said, yes, she acted outside the corporation. So therefore, I was able to go after her very, very expensive condo in the city of Atlanta, her Jaguar, anything she had of value. And believe it or not, the moment I got that judgment, suddenly money showed up. Yeah. Dang. Yeah. Yeah. So that's a good lesson for, I mean, even if you don't plan, no one plans on being in a lawsuit, right? But you never know what could happen. And so just, yeah, don't pierce the corporate veil. That's really good advice. I love that. Yeah. Act as a business when you're doing business. Act on your personal as a personal. Don't mix the two together. Don't let them cross over because once you do that, you give an attorney the ability to say they're acting outside of the corporation to support the corporation. So therefore, we should be able to go after their personal checkbook and their accounts, their savings, your retirement, whatever it is. Just don't do it. And if you can't afford it, just say you can't afford it out of the business because it's just too risky. trust me there isn't every attorney will advise their client on this and it'll become a problem yeah that's good advice all right let's land this plan it's been great brian why don't you tell us how you got the gym and uh all the tactical stuff we can learn from you there so i was consulting for a very large company in atlanta for several years um doing production and it was a hated to drive in rush hour. And, you know, I was getting up very early to try and avoid it. And I was just tired of not being home as much. And so I literally prayed one night. I said, God, I'd love to have something close to home. Maybe I can just edit from home and, and not have to leave, get to see the kids finally grow up every day. And, um, There's a local gym, it's probably five minutes from my house, that the... I had been there for a while, so I had seen the original owners who created the gym. They sold it to a guy who had never held a job before. His parents were rich. I guess they thought he was wandering around life, not doing anything. They thought, why don't we buy him a business? So Daddy bought him this gym. I was a member of his gym for three years. He didn't even know my name when I approached him about buying it. So he put up a sign on November 15th, 2017, said the gym is closing in 30 days. And everybody was upset and mad and people were making comments about the fact that he ran this business into the ground. And he really did. So a couple of people said, why don't you buy the gym? You have other businesses. You're an entrepreneur. I said, I don't really see myself as a gym owner. And I don't know. I don't know. So I went home that night, one night, and over the weekend, I created a business plan. That's always number one on my list of if you don't build to do a business plan, don't open a business. Because you got to see it work out on paper. And writing a business plan allows you to get all the things you might forget about. And you need to see the financials. The problem with the financials were, so I went back to the guy who was closing the gym. I said, look, I might buy the gym. Do you have a P&L or anything that I can look at? And he just pointed to a box full of receipts. on the floor. And I said, you don't have like QuickBooks or Quicken or, or any, he said, no. I said, how do you know what you're making? He says, I don't know. My dad gives me the money every month to pay the bills. I said, okay. So I had to, I had the reason I ended up hooking up with the gentleman I became partners with was that he had managed other gyms. So I could rely on him for, um, information about the cost of vendors for that type of stuff and we i go so i go I write it up, I decide, let's do this. So I go to him and I say, how much do you want for the gym? He says, $350,000. I said, this is a failing gym. You don't get 350 grand for a failing business. He said, the gym equipment's worth that. I looked around, I said, well, it knew it is, but this is now 15 years old. I said, you go get a quote on how much somebody would buy this used equipment. There happened to be a used equipment buyer down the road for gym equipment about a half hour away. They came in, they gave him a $45,000 to buy it all, which for them, they had to resell it means they got to fix it up. So they're probably giving him 20 cents on a dollar. So I said, how about this? rather than you selling it to them and them taking it out of here, I'll give you the 45,000 and you can walk away from this and I'll take the business. He said, why would you do that? I said, because you still have two years left on your lease. I'm going to take over the lease and get you out of trouble. because the landlord's gonna come after you for that two years. He said, no, he won't do that. I said, oh no, I'm pretty sure he will. So I left there, I called the landlord cause I had spoken to him on the sidewalk, told him I would try and buy the business. I said, he doesn't believe that you are gonna come after him for the rest of it. He said, so they drafted a letter. and it was delivered certified stating that once he locked those doors, he would owe the remaining two years. Now I knew that this was being delivered to him on Friday morning and I knew what would happen. So obviously text and phone calls started coming to my phone, but I decided to not answer them all weekend. I just let him sweat it out. Like maybe I'd lost interest. And on Monday I went in to work out and he said, Hey, I've been calling you and texting you. I'm willing to sell you the business for 150. I said, no, I told you my offer. He got mad and he stopped. So I started working out. Then he came back out to me. He said, I'll do it for 55. I said, I told you it's 45. and he so he was mad but he knew that he was over a barrel because this would have been a lot of money he would have to pay the landlord and he didn't want to go to dad for that i said look i'm taking it over i'm literally getting you out of your trouble and i'm giving you some money to walk he said okay i'll take the deal i said no there's one more stipulation I'm going to give you 10,000 today and I'm going to give you $10,000 a month until I pay you the 40. He said, no, I'm walking away. I said, okay. So I left that day. He kept texting me new offers and I just didn't answer them. And I went back in on Wednesday to work out and he came in and he said, okay, we'll do the deal. And so I got this gym for now, by the way, he had run it from a thousand members when he bought it down to 169 paying members. You can't own a gym with that many members. And so it was a task, but I knew that we were going into January, which is resolution time. So this, if there was a time to get rebuild the membership, this was probably the best time to buy it. So on the 15th of December in 2017, we made that deal, signed it. He walked away and suddenly I was a gym owner. Wow. You still got it today? For $45,000. Yeah. That's awesome. I still do. I think there's a good lesson. We're at about 1400 members now, I think. Wow. That's awesome. That's amazing, man. I think the lesson there that I hear is, you know, we talk about in real estate investing, there's a lot of real estate investors listening to this. And, you know, there's a big emphasis on when you're doing direct to seller and buying in acquisitions, you know, you want to find like, what is the pain point? And it's not just you don't just want to find pain so that you can like press on it and find leverage like you want to help this person out. And the reality is, Brian, you found that that pain point, which was this, you know, to your least that he's going to have to owe for. And it's not like you're just pressing on the wound. It's like you're no, you're actually helping him out, but you're also making it a good deal for yourself. I think that's a good lesson. Yeah. I think the other half of that deal- You're not just taking advantage of people, you're helping them. I think that you probably helped the guy out in this case. I think there's one other lesson I want people to always get about this is that at the time, I really wasn't willing to spend, to go to my wife and say, look, I need a hundred grand for a failing business that probably won't be profitable for about eight months because we got to build the membership. And so one of the things I always tell people is that be willing to walk away. In your heart, you may want that deal to go through really bad. You want that property, you want that business, but if it's not right, Do not put yourself in a worse situation just because you just want it that badly. It's got to be right. So I always tell people, look, use your heart, but take your head with you, please. Yes. Don't get emotional about the deal. Yeah, that's good. Yeah. This is great timing. I've got to hop off. My wife has to take my daughter to a dentist appointment. It's so funny. But tell us real quick, where can people find you? And tell us about your book real quick, too. I have two books out right now. One is The Real Problems Destroying Education. And it's my wife's a public school teacher, but I had a business that sold resources to K through 12. And so during my travels around the country meeting with teachers and administrators, I saw a lot of things that alarmed me. So I wrote them down in a book. The second book is A Path to Faith Through Science and Common Sense. This really came about after my mom passed and there was a series of events and sort of miracles that I'd have trouble saying that, but that's really what they were. And so those two came about. You can find me. I have one place we set up. It's bryanthomaswetzel.com. B-R-Y-A-N-T-H-O-M-A-S-W-E-T-Z-E-L.com. And you can find all my social media links and there's some videos and you can see some of my past TV experience in there as well. That's awesome. Love it. Brian, thank you for being with me today. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Thank you. Legacy investors. We will see you next time. Bye-bye guys. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode of the legacy investor. Hey, if you want to help us grow and support us, please leave a review on apple podcast and Spotify. That really helps a lot. Please subscribe to my YouTube channel, Cameron Phil green. It's still new and growing, but I am going to start posting on there more regularly. Follow me on Instagram at Cameron underscore Phil green. And if you know someone who should be on this podcast, Go fill out the form on my website. It's CameronPhilGreen.com slash podcast. Fill out the form there. I'd love to have more guests on this podcast. It's been a blast. And music is by Eric Lopez Villaverde. Reach out to him for all your music needs. On Instagram, he's Eric Lopez Villaverde. Hope you guys have a great day and thank you for tuning in. Bye-bye.